


palm to palm

by starlight_sugar



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter/Funhaus RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Rock Band, Gen, Interviews
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-23
Updated: 2016-08-23
Packaged: 2018-08-10 13:02:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7846099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlight_sugar/pseuds/starlight_sugar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"We’re a band based in the people," Risinger says. "The music is just a side effect of us hanging out."</p><p>Alt-rock stars Jon Risinger and Barbara Dunkelman talk origin stories, alternate band names, and more in an exclusive interview.</p>
            </blockquote>





	palm to palm

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fictional story involving fictional likenesses of real people. Rooster Teeth does not have my permission to use any portion of my work in their content.
> 
> Disclaimer: I'm neither a journalist nor a rock band member. This article probably isn't journalistically viable; this band probably wouldn't get off the ground in the real world.

The Know:  Home  > Interviews  > Music  > Row Z

 

 **Row Z:** Changing the face of collaborative music

Alt-rock stars Jon Risinger and Barbara Dunkelman talk origin stories, alternate band names, and more in an exclusive interview.

By Ashley Jenkins  
August 21, 2016

 

“Don’t get the pound cake,” Jon Risinger says to me, as soon as I sit down across from him.

Next to him, Barbara Dunkelman shakes her head. “Don’t listen to him, get the pound cake.”

It’s a Wednesday afternoon, and the three of us are in a pastry shop that both of them assure me has great coffee and dessert selections. The pound cake is apparently an old argument, and the two of them spend several minutes trying to convince me to get or avoid the pound cake. They’re more down to earth than the average superstar - and make no mistake, both of them are superstars. Both Risinger and Dunkelman perform vocals and piano in alt rock band Row Z. Their chemistry as performers has been described as “not unlike the Beatles,” and that chemistry translates to their in-person interviews.

“This place is open twenty-four hours,” Dunkelman tells me, after I agree to get the pound cake and split it with her. (Risinger glares at me for several minutes afterwards.) “So if we hit a snag in a songwriting session, we would all come here together, get some coffee, get some cake, and figure out what the problems were.”

“And if we were lucky, we’d get around them,” Risinger adds.

As any critic will say, Row Z got around all of their problems. Their first album _Reading Palms_ debuted last month to universal acclaim, including a  five-star review from The Know’s music department. Before its release, Row Z embedded themselves in the rock scene by opening for mainstream rock band Huntsmen throughout their U.S. tour. They released their first single “Streetlights” during the tour, and it goes platinum the day before I sit down with Risinger and Dunkelman. Neither of them acknowledge the success; in fact, Risinger tells me after some prodding, “Platinum is just a color. The only thing that really matters is that the music matters to other people.”

While Risinger and Dunkelman are the most recognizable members of Row Z, they’re certainly not the only ones. Their guitarist Jordan Cwierz, who you may recognize for the Vines he made while on tour, was one of the core members when the band released their demo _Backseat Daredevil_. Their newest member is Aaron Marquis, a temporary drummer for the tour who, as Dunkelman describes it, “just sort of stuck around.” The four of them have stage presence and musical chemistry in spades.

Most notably, however, Row Z always names two additional band members: songwriter Miles Luna and sound engineer Kerry Shawcross. “It’s completely unprecedented, at least from a business standpoint,” says Shawcross. “Normally bands have talent and producers - cast and crew, so to speak. I’ve always been crew, but Jon and Babs decided that I’m cast now. They’ve turned down some important deals to keep me in their cast.”

One of these important deals, a potentially life-changing contract with Gravity Records, fell through only weeks before the band independently released their album. As several social media commenters pointed out, a contract with Gravity is not turned down lightly. For Row Z to reject a record label that made a name for itself by elevating indie bands is, as one viral Twitter comment read, “shitting in the mouth of every artist who cares about their music.”

“That’s bullshit,” Luna says of the comment. “If anything, we did it _because_ we care about the music so much. None of us are here to get famous or to get our songs in movies or anything. We’re here because we like what we do, and we like doing it together.”

“Gravity wanted to sign on Jon, Barb, Jordan, and Aaron as the band,” Shawcross explains. “Miles and I told them to do it, but Barb just looked at me and said, ‘If they don’t want you guys, they don’t want Row Z. They just want a bunch of musicians.’ So they said no.”

“I was afraid we’d shot ourselves in the foot,” Cwierz admits. “But as soon as we shut down Gravity, we started getting offers from record labels that wanted to sign all six of us. I think that was when we all realized that we wield a lot of power in the industry.”

“And that none of us know what to do with it,” Marquis adds.

Power is the last thing in mind for Risinger and Dunkelman, whose modest origin story has been told in magazines and news stories a hundred times over. Risinger was a freelance graphic designer, Dunkelman was an agent at a PR firm, and both needed a roommate. They were introduced by mutual friend Chris Demarais. (The entire band sings Demarais’s praises, although he has yet to make a public appearance with the band. Most members are on record calling him the unofficial seventh member, with the exception of Marquis, who only ever says that Demarais “has the ass of an angel and a face to match.”)

As the story goes, when the two moved in together, Risinger discovered that he and Dunkelman could both play the piano and sing. Demarais overheard them and introduced them to Luna, a songwriter with credits on half a dozen hit singles. Luna brought in Cwierz and Shawcross, and the five of them recorded a demo together. _Backseat Daredevil_ , which is still available for free on Bandcamp, exploded almost overnight and launched Row Z into the public eye.

Neither Risinger nor Dunkelman act like overnight sensations. They pause our interview several times to take selfies with fans, who range from a shy teenage boy to a woman who enthusiastically declares that Row Z “saved the Top 40.”

Dunkelman shakes her head when that woman walks away. “We’re not trying to save anything,” she says. “We’re having fun making music. All we want to do is have fun together.”

Throughout our hour-long conversation, Dunkelman and Risinger make that particularly clear. The fans are important, and the music is their purpose, but their real goal is to have a good time with friends. “And we’re lucky to have the best friends to do it with,” Risinger says. “I know everyone thinks their friends are the best, but I think ours might actually be the best.”

 

 **The Know:** We all know that nobody in the band was expecting to become as popular as you have, so in the beginning, what was your biggest dream?

 **BD:** Times Square on New Year’s Eve. But I abandoned that one pretty quickly for the more realistic goal of five hundred downloads on our demo.

 **JR:** I always wanted to see my name on iTunes.

 **The Know:** iTunes? Really?

 **JR:** Yeah, you know, iTunes doesn’t accept just anyone’s music. So I thought, if I ever get something I made on iTunes, if I can search myself and find something, then I know I’ve made it.

 **BD:** Well, the music is under the band’s name, not yours.

 **JR:** Same thing. I’m part of the band.

 **The Know:** What was the point when you realized that you were getting serious about music?

 **BD:** After we put our demo up, Jordan emailed it to a bunch of his music friends, just to get the word out. And one of them, Brandon [Farmahini, who later became Row Z’s tour promoter] loved it. So he passed it on to some of his friends, and the next thing we knew, celebrities were tweeting us and our demo had a hundred thousand downloads.

 **JR:** And that was just the first week.

 **BD:** I’m never gonna forget, we were all sitting together, watching the download count-

 **JR:** We were in here, actually.

 **BD:** Yeah, we were in that corner booth over there! We were all squished in that one booth, and we actually watched it hit half a million downloads, and Miles said, “We need to set up a PayPal or something and see if we can get donations and make money off of this.” And then we realized that we probably _could_ make money off of it.

 **The Know:** Was your original goal to make money?

 **BD:** Not at first. Our only real goal was the music and making what we wanted to make.

 **JR:** And it turned out that what we wanted to make was money.

 **The Know:** When did you guys formally switch careers to making music full-time?

 **BD:** Not until our demo was out.

 **JR:** Miles, Kerry, and Jordan were all already full-time musicians, so they were set. Babs and I had no idea what to expect in terms of income, so we waited until we knew that we’d be okay.

 **The Know:** Did you ever anticipate yourselves becoming musicians?

 **BD:** No.

 **JR:** God, no.

 **BD:** At first, we were just Miles’s guinea pigs.

 **The Know:** Guinea pigs?

 **BD:** He had a couple of other songwriting commitments when we met him, but he wanted to hear them bare-bones before they got produced. So he experimented on us. And then one day he came over yelling about how we performed the song better than the singer he wrote it for, so he started writing for us together.

 **The Know:** When did you all realize you’d come together as a band?

 **BD:** There were a lot of little moments, but the biggest one for me was when Jordan came over one day and tuned his guitar to our piano, which was used and really out of tune. And Jordan had said a thousand times before that his guitar was his baby and he loved it more than he loved us, but he fucked up his baby’s tuning for us. I remember thinking, “Shit, maybe he does love us after all. Maybe he wants us to sound good.” Everything from there on out made it better, but that was when I realized we were solid.

 **JR:** Well, the band wasn’t really fully formed until we added Kerry, and then Aaron. So for me it was the first show we did with all six of us.

 **The Know:** What do Miles and Kerry do at your live shows?

 **JR:** They work backstage. Miles and Kyle [Taylor, the band’s agent and Luna’s fiancé] make sure the venue can accommodate us, and Kerry runs our sound board.

 **The Know:** You’re the only band in the business who considers your songwriter to be a band member. Other than the obvious story with Gravity Records, how has that affected your business opportunities?

 **BD:** We were surprised it was an issue at all.

 **JR:** It’d be one thing if we were insisting on working with certain songwriters, but we felt like that wasn’t what we were doing.

 **BD:** They’re part of the reason we have a demo to begin with, they help on tours, and they’re two of the biggest influences on what music we produce. They’re band members.

 **The Know:** Speaking of tours, you guys got to open for Huntsmen’s tour.

 **JR:** Yeah, we did.

 **The Know:** How’d that happen?

 **BD:** I’ve known one of the band members since we were teenagers. We met online and fell in and out of touch a lot. And then when our demo dropped he emailed me, like, “Hey, you do music now, we need an opening act, I know we haven’t talked in eighteen months but you should definitely tour with us.”

 **The Know:** Which member was this?

 **BD:** He asked me to keep it a secret, because he wanted an air of mystery, but I can tell you his name rhymes with Smavin Smee.

_(Dunkelman winks. She means Gavin Free, the bassist of Huntsmen and one of the plethora of celebrities to promote Row Z’s demo.)_

**The Know:** Now that you’ve worked so closely with Huntsmen, is there any chance of your two groups collaborating on a single or even an album?

 **JR:** We’ve talked about it before.

 **BD:** We definitely have some similarities, stylistically speaking, but we wanted to land on our feet before we started talking seriously about it. I think we all want to, though.

 **JR:** I’d love to sing with Ryan [Haywood, the lead vocalist for Huntsmen] one day. The man’s a fucking maniac, I love him.

 **The Know:** You obviously interacted on tour, would you say you guys are friends?

 **BD:** Absolutely.

 **JR:** We had a blast.

 **BD:** You can’t be on tour with someone for two months without learning to love them. Or hate them, but luckily, we love them instead.

 **JR:** We had a lot of fun on the tour bus. There are a _lot_ of videos of us singing each other’s songs.

 **BD:** We’re saving those for a rainy day, though.

 **The Know:** Is there a lot of overlap between your fans and Huntsmen’s fans?

 **JR:** There’s enough that it matters.

 **BD:** After every show, we had a lot of people tweeting at us like, “I’d never heard of you, but you sounded great at the Huntsmen concert!” So we definitely got a lot out of that tour.

 **The Know:** Will Huntsmen be opening for your tour one day?

 **BD:** Yes.

 **JR:** You think so?

 **BD:** I think we can convince them to do a show, even if they don’t tour with us.

 **The Know:** You guys have made a point of saying that the band is all six of you. Will it still be Row Z if one of you leaves?

 **JR:** Depends who leaves. I think without Jordan, we’d be Row Q.

 **BD:** Yes and no. Of course the band will be different with different people in it, but it’s the same idea as why we added Aaron. The band is Row Z, no matter who’s in it, as long as we all want to be there.

 **JR:** I think if Aaron left, we’d be just fine.

 **The Know:** Do you consider him less of a member because he joined late?

 **JR:** Absolutely not. That was a joke, I was joking.

 **BD:** Aaron was fashionably late to the band, but the party didn’t start till he walked in?

 **JR:** He’s just as much a part of this band as Barb is, or Miles.

 **The Know:** What about the elusive Chris?

 **JR:** He doesn’t get to be part of the band until he agrees to do an interview.

 **The Know:** You’ve all said that he was pretty instrumental in you all meeting each other.

 **BD:** He introduced me to Jon, both of us to Miles, and all of us to Aaron when we needed a tour drummer.

 **JR:** Yeah, until then we’d been using drum samples and Kerry’s magic for percussion.

 **The Know:** And hand claps.

 **BD:** And hand claps! That’s actually me clapping at the beginning of “Streetlights”.

 **JR:** She clapped every time we tried to record the song. We couldn’t stop her.

 **BD:** You didn’t want to stop me.

 **The Know:** You consistently describe Miles as your songwriter, but all of you share writing credits on the songs. Does everyone work on every song?

 **JR:** Yes and no.

 **BD:** Normally Miles writes the lyrics, Jordan and Jon write the music, and the rest of us chip in where we can.

 **JR:** That’s not true, I’m one of the chipper-ins.

 **BD:** It all happens organically, though. Like, Miles will come up with an idea, and the rest of us will take it and pass it around and fuck it up. We come up with things and mash them all together. There’s a lot of coffee involved.

 **JR:** Ideas come from weird places sometimes. The name for “Streetlights” was Kyle’s idea.

 **BD:** Everything is a group effort.

 **The Know:** You guys are a lot more collaborative than most bands.

 **BD:** I think it’s because we’re all friends first. If I wake up tomorrow and it turns out I’ve been dreaming the last year and we’re all actually homeless on the streets, there’s nobody I’d rather be homeless on the streets with.

 **JR:** We’re a band based in the people, you know? A bunch of friends who hang out and write things. The music is just a side effect of us hanging out.

 **The Know:** But nobody gets along all the time. Have you ever faced any serious tensions?

 **JR:** Yeah, Jordan wanted to name our fucking band The Animators. I almost quit.

 **BD:** He’s not exaggerating.

 **The Know:** Why The Animators?

 **BD:** Jordan used to freelance animate. He thought it’d be cute.

 **JR:** I’m not a fucking animator.

 **The Know:** Where did the name Row Z come from?

 **BD:** We were hanging out and drinking wine, and I had a bottle of rosé, so I said we should just name the band Rosé. But Kerry said Row Z, and it stuck.

 **JR:** Part of it was also how if you’re in a stadium or an auditorium, row Z is one of the last rows. If you’re in row Z it means you’re in the cheap seats, but you’re also happy that you have a seat at all. That’s what we thought our music was going to be like. We were happy to have an album out at all, we were in the cheap seats. We just happened to get famous instead.

 **The Know:** Not the cheap seats anymore.

 **BD:** We’re like box seats. The nice ones. That recline.

 **The Know:** What about _Reading Palms_? Out of all the lines you could’ve chosen [the album title comes from a lyric in its lead track “Circular”] what made you pick that one?

 **BD:** We thought it sounded cool.

 **JR:** It came down to that or _Running in Circles,_ just because that was what it felt like we were doing trying to name the damn thing. It would’ve been super self-aware. Super cool.

 **BD:** He says that, but he was the one insisting on _Reading Palms._

 **JR:** Yeah, it was a better name. _Running in Circles_ was still good, though.

 **The Know:** You can save that for your second album. Can we expect that any time soon?

 **BD:** Our priority right now is organizing a _Reading Palms_ tour, actually. Brandon and Kyle have been busting their asses on that, and hopefully we’re going to have news sometime soon.

 **JR:** We know our music means a lot to a lot of people, and we want to give them the chance to hear it live.

 **The Know:** Do you feel like you’re obligated to tour?

 **BD:** Maybe a little, but it’s an obligation we want to fulfill.

 **JR:** We have this opportunity, and we want to take it.

 **BD:** We have the chance to go around the world and see people who want to see us. It’d be such a waste not to take advantage of that. We really, really want to tour.

 **The Know:** Because of the fans?

 **BD:** Because of the fans, of course, but it’s more than just that. Right now there’s a dedicated team of people arranging for me to go around the world with my best friends, to show off something I’ve done, and I get to do it for the fans, the people who made this happen. It’s everything I could’ve dreamed of and more, and I’m never going to stop being grateful for that.

 **JR:** We’re lucky to have this chance. We’re going to hang onto it as long as we can.

 

 _Reading Palms_ is available now on Spotify, iTunes, and Google Music. Information about Row Z’s upcoming tour is available at  rowzband.com. 

**Author's Note:**

> An ancient idea, alive at last. For more ideas that probably won't be written for several months, you can follow me on [Tumblr](http://pervincetosscobble.tumblr.com) or [Twitter.](http://twitter.com/ezrabridgers) Thanks for reading!


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